Sunday, October 27, 2013

Lawmaker Offers Strong Defense of U.S. Surveillance Efforts in Europe

WASHINGTON — The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Mike Rogers, on Sunday offered one of the most vigorous defenses of American surveillance activities in Europe, saying that much of the anger and resentment they have engendered were the result of misunderstandings.

Mr. Rogers, Republican of Michigan, said that the National Security Agency’s surveillance program in question — particularly in regards France, but also Germany — had been badly misrepresented in news reports. If the French understood that it was designed to protect them and others from the threat of terror, he said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” “they would be applauding and popping Champagne corks.”

The widely reported notion that the National Security Agency had monitored 70 million French phone calls, Mr. Rogers said, was “100 percent wrong, and that’s why this is so dangerous.”

Reporters who had seen one security agency slide provided by Edward J. Snowden, a former agency contract employee, “misinterpreted some of the acronyms at the bottom of the slide and saw this 70 million phone call figure – this was about a counterterrorism program that had nothing to do with French citizens,” Mr. Rogers asserted.

The congressman also said that reports of the monitoring of phone calls of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany were incomplete, fragmentary and, therefore, misleading. The most recent report, published in the German news magazine Der Spiegel on Saturday, cited a document — apparently from a National Security Agency database — that indicated Ms. Merkel’s cellphone was first listed as a target of surveillance in 2002.

The disclosures, Mr. Rogers said, did not “necessarily fit with what has actually happened, right? So it’s not an exact, correct interpretation of what they’re seeing. They’re seeing three or four pieces of a 1,000-piece puzzle and trying to come to a conclusion.”

In neither the French nor the German case did he offer any elaboration of what, in his view, the National Security Agency was actually doing in France or Germany.

But Mr. Rogers went further, suggesting that the Europeans lagged behind the United States not only in intelligence capability, but also in governmental oversight, so that some European officials were applying a standard to the United States that their own spy agencies would fail.

“There’s a reason that the president of the United States’ BlackBerry is encrypted: There’s a lot of people that would like to get those conversations,” he said, without elaborating.

Mr. Rogers said that while American spy agencies were subject to multiple levels of oversight, “they don’t have that in some of our European capitals, and some of this has been shocking — not to the intelligence services,” but to the governments for which they work